Pet and animal owners are aware that feeding and providing water for pets during brief absences is always a concern. Placing pets into pet care facilities usually results in the pet coming home with a case of “kennel cough” or similar extremely contagious disease, leaving pets even with friends or family forces the pet into strange surroundings and so on.
It would be advantageous to leave a pet or animal in its normal living space, however, the problem of food and water still remains. In attempting to solve this problem a number of automated pet feeders have been proposed
These devices provide a pet a means of receiving nourishment on a regular basis but have the extreme disadvantage that they either do not actually remove stale water or else require some plumbing to be done to provide some sort of flow through system. If they do provide clean water, it tends to be arranged in a large trough unfamiliar to the animal.
It would be advantageous to provide food and water on a regular automated basis, but to also allow the animal to use familiar feeding bowls, and at the same time to provide a means of cleaning out the familiar feeding bowls.